SSD Performance in the Cloud

There's a perception when it comes to cloud storage that mostly it should be used for secondary or tertiary storage. But the folks at StorSimple would beg to differ. The company this week officially rolled out a set of storage appliances that are integrated with StorSimple software running on cloud computing platforms from Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain and Microsoft.

What makes the StorSimple approach to cloud computing different is that besides the fact that its systems are optimized for Windows environments, the appliances only update blocks of data. No block of data is ever stored twice, and the system ranks blocks based on how frequently they are accessed, said StorSimple Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howells.

The end result, says Howells, is a cloud computing storage service that offers performance that is equivalent to a solid-state drive (SSD) because all the data in the system has been deduplicated and all the data needed at any given time for any given working set of data is automatically cached.

That means that cloud storage systems, said Howells, are capable of supporting primary applications, as opposed to just be relegated to secondary storage.

It may take a little time before we see similar approaches for other environments. But for Windows-centric applications, StorSimple is trying to redefine the way we think about storage in the enterprise regardless of where it might actually be physically located.

This farticle is nothing but double talk bull. It doesn't matter how the data is stored in the cloud, only an idiot would try to compare it to the speed of an SSD. And that's what this implication is here. It's also a deceptive way to lure people away from the SSD craze and shopping to read about something that is totally not the same thing. blah. Reply

Hello,
The mention of SSD is in relation to the appliance containing SSD devices. StorSimple treats the cloud as a tier, and the algorithm used for data layout keep the vast majority of IOs occurring within the confines of the SSD. Hope this clears up any confusion; please let me know if you'd like to have a longer conversation on this.
Thanks,
Joel
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